Here’s something totally normal and sane and not at all weird: Image used to publish comics about this “bad girl” character named Angela? She was an angel-from-heaven/bad-girl who hunted hellspawns, while wearing a metal bikini. Hellspawns were the subject of a 1990s Image comic called Spawn, named after salmon-fucking.
This made more sense in the 1990s. It made total sense back then. That was a different time for us all though. Something like 20 years ago, this month.
The Spawn comics were made at first by a guy named Todd McFarlane– he was one of the cartoonists who founded Image Comics. He’d been working for Marvel Comics, but Marvel didn’t let creators own anything they create. So, he very dramatically quit the company, and formed Image, which is still where people in mainstream comics mostly go if they want to own what they create.
But McFarlane ended up in lawsuits. Lawsuits with all these people: a hockey player; a guy with the same name as Spawn; and a writer named Neil Gaiman, a writer popular in the 1990s for writing comics about alternative people having dreams, mostly dreams about other alternative people. And arguably more popular since thanks to success in print, on television, and in Hollywood.
Gaiman claimed to have created Angela, and, after the dust of the various ensuing lawsuits cleared, Neil Gaiman indeed owned at least 50% of Angela. So, this month, he’s turned around and licensed Angela back to Marvel comics. The company Todd McFarlane had made a big whole point of quitting in the first place. Marvel Comics had famously stolen all of their good characters from Jack Kirby, back in the 1960s; stole some other stuff, too, though– Blade from Marv Wolfman; Howard the Duck from Steve Gerber, etc. But gosh, it had been a while. It had been too long– too, too long.
Good news, though: Marvel can now say not only that they have their hands on an Image comic character, but that best of all, it’s against the obvious wishes of one of its co-creators, too!
Yay! Neil Gaiman has finally struck a real blow for… revenge?
This is all in the context of a Marvel comics crossover named The Middle-Age of The Ultron, which I think is about an evil robot, wearing a leather jacket and hitting on high-school girls at Denny’s? The crossover is only about half-over, but the Wall Street Journal or JAMA or whoever have already reported that the top-secret, ultra-secret, “no-one will guess” secret finale three or four months from now is, apparently, that an angel from heaven in a metal bikini will show up to hunt the 1990s Image Comics character Spawn? Sure, sure: exactly how a Marvel comic about a g-damn robot should end.
The crossover is written by Brian Michael Bendis, as is a subsequent issue of the new Guardians of the Galaxy series which will be co-written by Gaiman, and is said to feature Angela. Fun-fact: Bendis himself started his work-for-hire comics career working for Todd McFarlane … before also having a falling-out with McFarlane.
Marvel, Gaiman, and Bendis’s collaboration will ship in an airtight plastic baggie, to better keep the erotic stink of their revenge-fucking away from the deteriorating effects of oxygen presumably. Gaiman and Bendis are then expected to team up to place a paper bag filled with a dog’s feces in front of Todd McFarlane’s front door, light it on fire, ring the doorbell, and watch from the cover of night (so goth!) expecting Todd McFarlane to run onto his porch and stamp out the fire, with hilarity to ensue. But McFarlane will not be at home that night, and it is expected that they will instead watch Todd McFarlane’s home catch fire at a surprising speed. As they watch the bonfire that ensues, each man will feel a single tear roll down his cheek. They will hug, exchange briefcases, and walk away from each other, never to see one another again. The briefcase given to Neil Gaiman will contain a copy of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with a tender, grammatically-horrifying inscription from Bendis. The briefcase given to Bendis will contain half of a shrimp-salad sandwich that had gone bad on the Tuesday of the week before.